I work in a call center where we take payments over the phone. I have verified all account information with this caller.

Me: “How can I assist you today?”

Customer: “I’d like to make a payment.”

Me: “Okay, are we using a card on file or a new card?”

Customer: “New card.”

Me: “Okay, go ahead with your card number whenever you are ready.”

The caller starts pushing buttons.

Me: “Ma’am, are you there?”

Customer: “Did you get the number?”

Me: “No, it sounds like buttons were being pressed.”

Customer: “Yeah, I didn’t want anyone to hear my number.”

Me: “You have to say it out loud for me to get it.”

Customer: “I don’t think it works like that.”

I work the night audit shift as well as housekeeping at our hotel. This particular day starts like any other; I get my cleaning cart out and I’m in the middle of scanning my chart, looking to see which linen sizes I need.

Out of the corner of my eye, someone walks past me down to the dead-end of the hall. I usually greet the guests, but he is already well past me. I peek down the hall, wondering which room he’s even going to, and I have to do a double-take. This man is butt-a** naked.

He must’ve done a double-take, too, because when I look back, he is ducking behind the wall.

Guest: “I’m sorry! Can you help me? I don’t know which room I’m in.”

I’m kind of stunned. I’ve only worked here for a few months.

Me: “How do you not know where your room is?”

Guest: “I don’t know! I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I don’t know my room.”

He keeps repeating that like he’s going to cry, so now I’m feeling really bad. I use my walkie to ask the front desk if anyone with his name is on a reservation, and of course, it isn’t. Now I’m wondering if this man is homeless and trying to get in a room or if he has a mental problem or something.

Me: “Just sit tight for a minute.”

I hurried down to the front desk. I told them the situation, and they hurried up there. This guy was already gone, running through the hotel. He found another housekeeper, and she did the smart thing, gave him a towel, and walkied us. He went with the front desk workers to figure out where the h*** his room was.

Apparently, this guy was sleepwalking and had just woken up when I saw him! I know I had a panic, but I can only imagine his. Hopefully, he learned not to sleep naked in a hotel with sleepwalking tendencies!

When I was fresh out of college, I got called up for jury duty. It was actually a pretty fascinating experience and I highly recommend it. Some of the people I served with, though, were… interesting.

We’d agreed on most of the fourteen or so criminal charges in the case, including two of the three counts of child endangerment. Now, we were discussing the final of those. One of the criteria we were told for being guilty of this particular charge was that the child had to feel endangered. The child in this case was a baby. All but one of us concluded that, due to the particular circumstances, the baby had no idea what was going on and thus didn’t feel endangered and thus the person wasn’t guilty of this particular charge.

The holdout was a woman from the Caribbean — I forget where precisely. I point this out only to explain the sentence structure of her argument since English was her second language or perhaps even third. This is how the argument went, verbatim.

Woman: “When I was in my country, one day, I try to feed my baby. He wouldn’t take the breast! Wouldn’t take the breast!” *Pauses* “Lightning come down, set fire to the house!”

The Rest Of Us: “…”

Woman: “…”

The Rest Of Us: “…”

Me: *Grasping at straws* “Um…okay, so… you’re saying that babies have some kind of sixth sense about what is going on around them, so this baby knew that the man was threatening him even though the baby’s mother wasn’t really worried about the guy?”

Woman: “YES! Babies know!”

Everyone else proclaimed their disbelief.

Me: “Okay, why don’t we move on to the other charges and come back to this one later?”

Eventually, we were able to convince her that, in this case, lightning not come down, not set fire to the house, as far as this baby was concerned.

This story is part of our Best Of July 2021 roundup!

Read the next Best Of July 2021 roundup story!

Read the Best Of July 2021 roundup!

My spouse and I are traveling in San Francisco. We decide to use a car rental service that lets people rent out their personal or spare car. Since I’m most familiar with a particular kind of car, we pick that kind to rent. We buy the optional extra insurance on our vehicle, just in case. One of the things I’ve noticed with [Car]s is that there’s a tendency for the back latch to fall off.

So, we use the app and rent someone’s old used [Car]. The back latch is loose, and I know it’s going to fall off. I warn my spouse and mark it in the damages. No problem.

Sure enough, the latch falls off partway through the trip.

This story, though, isn’t actually about the latch. It’s about what we discover when we are cleaning up the car to return it. In the driver’s side pocket, there is a glass tube with brown residue in it, wrapped in tin foil. And underneath the driver’s seat is a mysterious triangular hole cut in the floor of the car for no readily apparent reason.

My spouse and I figure that it is probably a crack pipe and that the car is probably used in some sort of drug smuggling, hence the triangular hole in the floor.

We debate reporting it to the cops. Ultimately, we decide not to because we are on vacation and we are afraid of what would happen if they got involved.

When we get home, they don’t charge us for the latch… but we charge the insurance we got for the hole in the floor.

I am a lawyer practicing in a pretty diverse area. I speak English, Sinhala, and Tamil, and I take meetings in all three languages.

I had this couple come to meet with me. The husband spoke Sinhala as his first language and had a smattering of English, but the wife spoke Cantonese as her first language and spoke decent English. It was very confusing. I still have no idea how they managed to get married without being able to communicate without a translator. A lot of pointing, I suppose?

The meeting went okay, with me relaying things in Sinhala and English and translating where necessary, but the final moments of the meeting were the most surprising.

Me: “So, is there anything else we need to discuss?”

Husband: *Looks bashful* “Um, would you mind telling my wife I love her?”

Me: “No?”